Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
I first searched “Gruen transfer” using Kagi. First hit was the Wikipedia article with enough showing to feel I didn’t need to go there because of what I’d read here already. Right below that, indented for grouping, is a Wikipedia link to a TV show by the same name. I skimmed that article to see where/when it was shown. Anyone here ever watched it? Curious if it’s any good.
Then I searched the same with google. The presentation is more noisy. And organized less. It’s hard to compare the two, because viewing one before the other affects the second (no double slit opportunity here). I did notice that I felt subliminally drawn/distracted to the visual thumbnails of the tv show, rather than the Wikipedia entry.
Also, I reckon we should still do it - to get the extra day off.
They should be prosecuted for it.
That's a job for the government to do, and there's loads of avenues the government can do if it deems local stores something important for the general population: controlling commercial rents, direct subsidies (colloquially implemented as "tax breaks"), introducing extra taxes on online retail to finance these, or limiting at-scale discounts for Amazon, Walmart and other nationwide chains so that small retail has a chance to compete again.
Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
I’m convinced that if you pitch building better products than the competition as a sustainable business plan to VCs today, they would laugh you out of the room.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
I had a greasemonkey script that I wrote to remove certain posts from my timeline. However, based on how often it broke, and more importantly, how it broke, it was clear Facebook was actively combatting scripts like that. FBPurity is a centrally maintained version of that, but I still found that getting updates from my friends was just not happening - it relies on FB showing you those posts (interspersed among the ads and other garbage), and they weren’t doing that. I have also culled down my friends list over the years, as acquaintances showed themselves to be unrepentant assholes, so there’s just less and less I was missing out on in the first place. I still have messenger on my phone, but I’ve disabled notifications so I only check it on my terms, and that has been working pretty well to remain connected with the people I really care about staying in touch with.
It also makes it painfully clear how little user interaction there is publicly on the site...
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
On the web, you access it by pressing Menu → Feeds → Friends. Words on mobile and desktop browsers.
It's not intentional, but it is evolutionary, in the sense that we've never had this discussion about onethingpedia, the website that had a design optimal at making you leave after you found what you were looking for, because nobody ever heard of it.
I don't know anyone other than people over 50 who still check their facebook feeds and the kids are out enjoying the sun today
They do not have any intention to confuse or distract, yet the effect of causing people to linger and browse remains.
In the comments here, Amazon and AliExpress have been pointed to, but again this does not seem to be confusing by intent. There is a degree of deception by some vendors but that exists purely to get people to buy their product.
On the other hand, I have always thought that one of the primary uses of A/B testing, was to abdecate the moral responsibility of decision making. You no longer need to intend to coerce, cheat, deceive, or confuse. A/B testing let's you only intend to make money and all of the malicious descions are taken out of your hands.
So yeah, while the Facebook timeline is a mess, the real question is: what is the intended purpose of scrolling the timeline in the first place? For most users it isn't a clear case of "I want X" and they don't actually have a specific goal in mind. Instead, it's some combination of seeing what your friends are doing and be entertained by novel items. From that perspective it's inevitable that the timeline would end up this way.
Those should all be separate things. But tech companies are far, far too large, and growth must be achieved forever no matter what.
> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.
So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?
If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?
Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.
Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.
If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.
So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.
That's bizarre.
When I go to m.facebook.com it consists of posts from people I know and groups I'm in.
There are occasional carousels of People You Might Know or Groups You Might Like, but other than that it's just words and photos from real people.
* Stories
* A post from one group I am subscribed to
* People you may know
* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to
* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to
* Reel from people I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a person I don't know
* Another meme
* A post from a friend
* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)
* A post from a friend
* A post from another "somebody"
* Another reel
* Another unwanted comic
3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
I think they realized the antitrust folks are coming, so they released a "friend feed":
https://lifehacker.com/tech/facebooks-new-friends-only-lets-...
I haven't been able to find it myself - I refuse to use the app, browser only.
Now, presumably you hate this, and I certainly hate this, but without doing things their way, we're unwanted. They want the consumers and they want those that can be convinced to follow suggestions and join new groups.
Once upon a time, the technically literate would leave Altavista and join Google to start a migration, but Facebook buys the Instagrams and slowly twists them the same way to suit them. It's miserable enshittification.
* 10 day old post from someone I know, involving other people I know
* a reel, with no origin specified
* People you may know
* a recent post from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* a recent photo from someone I know
* an old post from someone I know
* People you may know
* An old post from someone I don't know tagging someone I know
* then I scroll further and it does a weird jumping thing so I can no longer keep track of where I was
This is actually better than I remember in terms of "relevant" things, but I long ago lost the habit of facebook, and sometimes seem to get a whole lot of stuff that doesn't feel relevant which tends to put me off. Also that odd scrolling behaviour that starts happening after a bit.
I'm in plenty of active groups. And some of my friends still actively post. But I have to go out of the main feed and into the "feeds" section to see any of that.
1. 2-3 posts from actual friends
2. "Reels" of young women jumping on trampolines in bikinis
(Note: I do not and have never watched Reels on Facebook.)
That and the cookie popup DOM node...
If you instead pay money, there’s even an incentive to reduce time spent, which translates into a focus on efficiency and customer focus.
The hard part is competing with free as in beer. It would be great if users learned more about the data that’s collected on them, in order to power the ad machine. If it was more concrete, I think more people would be deterred. Especially influential people.
if u make a more than normal transfer they want u to jump hoops or somebody from call center calls u is this transfer what u wanted to do sir?
store the money in the bank, dont spend it.
(This is not financial advice)
Went through Copenhagen airport recently. Right after security, there is a sign “All gates ->” which takes you on a detour through the main “taxfree” shop - that is close to. as low at it gets imo.
1. it is busy because a shop is not as well structured for walking through as a hallway is. The shop is structured for you to look at things and buy.
2. you have a child with ADHD or similar problems which has to be watched because they might break a big bottle of something on accident.
3. You have to navigate a wheelchair or a large pram through the area.
4. This shop is actually very big so there is a lot of tax free shelving to walk around to actually get out to the hallways that take you to the gates.
When you get through security/customs/etc you find yourself on a long wide corridor, which has all the gates on it, and also the entrances to the individual shops.
One of the funniest to me was that the architect didn't like the forced shopping path of modern airports. So he just didn't add any. And no-one noticed until after they'd built the foundations, so then they added a new floor, but it would be out of the way so who'd want to go there reducing income forecasts, while requiring new ventilation requirements, fire suppression systems etc.
If you work on poorly defined constantly changing software tasks it's all quite familiar. Just with a literal airport.
What makes it double funny is the whole security theater around being unable to carry certain items during flight (due to risk of explosives, for example). A determined person would probably be able to craft some makeshift explosives with things one can buy at the taxfree shop.
That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxical_reaction
2. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40772009I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04
We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.
Big box stores are all dying or dead.
Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.
Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.
Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.
Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.
This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.
If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
Why can’t Google’s algorithm determine that any page with a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality, low effort blogspam?
I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their needs and returns what they need?
It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.
I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.
With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.
It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.
Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.
Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.
If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.
Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?
From my life, if you feel like you shouldn't but still do, you should stop/check yourself. Applies to the hard things in life, but also the easy ones like not using a store.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
Has anyone found a way to disable this?
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !
Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.
Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.
And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.
No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.
I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)
But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.
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...which is related, no?
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.
I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.
Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for nice people they don't know.
Right before I retired I actually saw this starting at the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes (oops!) but it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to NOT believe the best way to increase metrics and revenue was to just make our product experiences even better.
When I was in my late 20s and flying off to some trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was interesting talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04
Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.
I'll open a smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through for a while. And then realize my intent was originally just to send someone a message.
Modern UI is definitely disorienting.
Sites like Etsy implement this dark pattern in ways intentionally intended to make CSS-based blocking of injected sponsored products difficult to block. The arms race between user agents and corporate manipulation continues, and corporate web designers will use every tool available to subject users nonconsensually to their preferred experience. This is why I consider it a net loss for users to add functionality to the "web platform". The corporation is your enemy and they're well-funded.
The feed as a basic concept is great. It's basically an inbox, and no more of a Gruen Transfer enabler than an email inbox. Hell, it's no more inherently an enabler than an aisle in the store. It's not the existence of the feed, it's what's in it.
Facebook's feed is what allowed me to see what my friends were up to without clicking on every single profile. That made Facebook hugely more useful to me than MySpace.
But there are eyeballs on the feed, and money to be made by showing ads to those eyeballs and capturing more minutes of attention to in turn show more ads. That's the incentive.
I doubt that feeds are case of you can't find what you were looking for. I don't think most users are looking for anything in particular when they browse a feed. Now jamming more things in the search page may count. And Twitter's nasty habit of shifting around what you're looking at so you can't find a post surely counts.
So Instagram, etc's overall design might have Gruen Transfer, the feed itself is merely the place your attention goes when you struggle to figure out what to do.
I mean, originally supermarkets weren't laid out in a confusing way, right? But they are now.
The feed wasn't created to disorient, it was a great organization feature actually. It helped you see the most recent updates from friends and actually saved time at first compared to manually clicking around and getting lost on other parts of profiles.
Is it true? Is it a new thing? Could someone tell the telco industry, surely they are unaware of that, because as recently as last month, I had to threaten legal action again a european telco who refused to not automatically renew my "pre-paid, subscription free" plan... Any reference to that regulation would be appreciated.
cheschire•9h ago
HenryBemis•8h ago
One day Sam will have a chat with Jeff and presto, 99% of the links will be high-profit-margin AMZN affiliate links.
(where money can be made, money will be made)
Torn•8h ago
There are parallels to early web here I'm sure of it.
I think I'm a little more worried about AI being subtly influenced in its training data -- they can't explain why they give the tokens they do, and even chain of thought / explain your working thinking is similarly made up and hallucination-prone
weard_beard•6h ago
actionfromafar•8h ago
gh0stcat•3h ago
jerf•5h ago
Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
pixl97•2h ago
Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.
moq4•8h ago